Arctique

Chez Namaste Nancy: Abraham Anghik Ruben: De Young Museum. Made of calcite, caribou antler, musk ox horn and commericial cotton fiber, this "Passage of Spirits"" by Ruben is one of the most beautiful and mysterious pieces in the show.

The sea goddess Sedna, sits at the bow of the boat, guiding the rowers over the dangerous ocean. The small sculptures in the boat are half human and half animal; features are indicated with minimal and elegant carving. The caribou antler sails could represent the swirling firmament or the smoke that issues from lamps, lighting the way in a dark universe. Most of the objects on display are of historical importance and show how Eskimo and Inuit peoples rose to the challenge of their difficult environment.
Alaska Native Artistic Revitalization, Dissertation (University of Washington, 2012)
June 2015. Coordinated with the Battle of Midway as part the Pacific Theater of World War II, around the island of Amaxnax̂, at Dutch Harbor, the Japanese Navy attacked the American territory of the Aleutian Islands.

On June 3rd and 4th, 1942, six months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, they took the US Navy Weather Station on Qisxa island, Kiska in English, that held 12 Navy personnel. Two American soldiers lost their lives as the Japanese rounded up the island's residents. One man fled their capture, but turned himself in after about a month and a half of hiding on the island. One of the main reasons for the occupation was that is doing so they could control that shipping route corridor of the North Pacific.
A tradition of storytelling: The new landscape of Native literature - : Books. Literature about Native Americans, whether written for children or adults, by Native people or non-Native people, has tended to feature characters anchored in romanticized ideas of the past.

Stereotypical portrayals tend to show Natives as either noble savages or romantic mystics; modern, sometimes more complex portrayals often still rely on the image of the Indian as an alcoholic or addict. “But what I’m seeing now, with students and with young Native writers going on to publish, is that they aren’t allowing other people to define who they are anymore,” said author Joseph Boyden (Métis), when asked by Pasatiempo about the state of Native American literature.

Bill Hess – Aġviq: Sacred Whale, Carrier of Life « burn magazine. Bill Hess May 5, 2015: Rays stream from sun onto ocean to strike hunters from all angles, cooking them out of their clothing layer by layer until finally they stand bare chested at the water’s edge.

I remember a beach in Mexico – but this is Arctic Alaska, where Iñupiat hunters have ventured onto Chukchi Sea ice to seek the gift of aġvik – the bowhead whale. Since Time Immemorial, aġvik has given Iñupiat not only nutrition, but the foundation of a resourceful, resilient, culture and enabled them to thrive in one of the harshest environments on earth. Multiple threats have followed the British explorers who sailed into their home in the early 19th century, followed by the Yankee whaling industry, which decimated the bowhead.

Imported diseases decimated the Iñupiat.
Half a million dollars granted to Anchorage Museum's Polar Lab - Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center. Half a million dollars granted to Anchorage Museum's Polar Lab FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Aug. 18, 2014 Contact: Laura Carpenter (907) 929-9227 (w) lcarpenter@anchoragemuseum.org Anchorage Museum’s Polar Lab receives $570,000 in grants Program explores life in the North through art and research The Anchorage Museum has been awarded a $495,000 grant from the Rasmuson Foundation and a $75,000 grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to support Polar Lab, a multidiscipline, multi-year series addressing life in the Arctic.

Through its Polar Lab, the Anchorage Museum is bringing together artists from Alaska and around the world to research ideas related to the North through explorations in contemporary art, science and the environment.
Sonya Kelliher-Combs - HIDE: Skin as Material and Metaphor - The National Museum of the American Indian - George Gustav Heye Center, New York, NY. Dana’s Super-Awesome Mount St. Helens Field Trip Guide IV: Hummocks Trail. We've left the lovely breezes and rippling blue of Coldwater Lake; a road crossed, a tiny distance traversed, and we are in a rather grimmer place.

If you had been standing here in the North Fork Toutle River Valley on the morning of May 18th, 1980, you would have died. Never mind if you had your car carefully pointed towards a speedy escape.
Microreview: Joan Naviyuk Kane, Hyperboreal. Hyperboreal by Joan Naviyuk Kane University of Pittsburgh Press, $15.95 (paper) The abundance of stones in Hyperboreal notwithstanding, this is not a book about what will be left when human figures have disappeared from the far northern landscape, nor about the presumption of likeness between those figures and what will outlast them: “Far pillars could / Resemble human figures // Though only rock rises / From some progression / Of dust, demand, and rotten / Wood.”

What is at stake in Hyperboreal is not only the threat of “cultural and biological extinction” faced by the Inupiaq people of Alaska, but also the contested place of the human in that landscape and, more particularly, the lyric subject. Kane questions its customary property (which is loss) and its dream of deliverance from extinction through craft. In “Innate,” the speaker marks items on a checklist (“Cheek, tongue, headache”) and asserts, “I am a human being.”
"Our Story" Rebecca Lyon. Stonington Gallery. Tribal Affiliation: Siberian Yupik / Inupiaq Susie Silook is a Yupik/Inupiaq writer, carver, and sculptor.

She is from the remote Siberian village of Gambell on St. Lawrence Island, Alaska.
Susie Silook, Yupik/Inupiaq Archives - Home & Away Gallery. About - Bio. Sonya Kelliher-Combs was raised in the Northwest Alaska community of Nome.

Her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree is from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Master of Fine Arts is from Arizona State University. Through her mixed media painting and sculpture, Kelliher-Combs offers a chronicle of the ongoing struggle for self-definition and identity in the Alaskan context. Her combination of shared iconography with intensely personal imagery demonstrates the generative power that each vocabulary has over the other.
The Alaska Native Studies Blog: August 2013. Native Alaska possesses a wide arrangement of talented artists and writers, including carvers, poets, novelists, filmmakers, performance artists, painters, dancers, and musicians.

The Indigenous people from throughout the state have formed a strong cultural archive of work from which at times I have drawn from in the production of my scholarship. This all started for me upon entering graduate school at the University of Oregon in 2003. Amid my first week at Oregon I met with an Alaska Native professor for coffee at a place on Patterson and 13th, across from the Green Duck.
The Alaska Native Studies Blog: June 2015. About - Bio. MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR: The Art of Sonya Kelliher-Combs. Alaska Native Gallery.